DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) is a series of short tests designed to evaluate key literacy skills among students in kindergarten through 8th grade, such as phonemic awareness, alphabetic principle, accuracy, fluency, and comprehension. The theory behind DIBELS is that giving students a number of quick tests, will allow educators to identify students who need additional assistance and later monitor the effectiveness of intervention strategies.
Mark Shinn originated "Dynamic Indicators of Basic Skills." The first subtests of this early literacy curriculum-based measurement system were created by Dr. Ruth Kaminski while she was a student of Dr. Roland Good at the University of Oregon with the support of federal funding. DIBELS is used by some kindergarten through eighth grade teachers in the United States to screen for students who are at risk of reading difficulty, to monitor students' progress, to guide instruction, and most recently – to screen for risk for dyslexia in compliance with state legislation.
The DIBELS comprise a developmental sequence of one-minute measures: naming the letters of the alphabet (alphabetic principle), segmenting words into phonemes (phonemic awareness), reading nonsense words (alphabetic principle), reading real words (orthographic knowledge), and oral reading of a passage (accuracy and fluency). DIBELS also includes a three-minute reading comprehension measure that uses the maze approach, which is a modification of the cloze test approach that provides students with answer choices for missing words.
DIBELS scores are intended to only be used for instructional decision-making (i.e., to identify students who need additional instructional support and monitoring response to intervention) and, as such, should not be used to grade students.
Criticisms
DIBELS has become a fairly widely used assessment for early reading intervention by many schools in the United States. Since its development and release, there have been many critics challenging the effectiveness and validity of the DIBELS assessments. One criticism has been that although the Official DIBELS homepage claims that there is an abundance of research validating the DIBELS assessments much of that was unpublished. "Of the 89 references listed, only 18 are published in professionally reviewed journals in the fields of psychology, special education, or music therapy, and eight are chapters in edited books." Similar criticism notes that the DIBELS developers claim that the research base was the reason for the widespread use of the assessments, but critics say the political pressure to use DIBELS as a part of the Reading First Initiative was the reason for the widespread adoption. An article from 2005 in EducationWeek states that DIBELS got the competitive edge because its developers and their colleagues at the University of Oregon were consultants to the U.S. Department of Education for Reading First, with one of the main developers, Mr. Good, being one of the persons who evaluated 29 early literacy tests including his own product.
Brant Riedel (2007) wrote, "... the ORF [Oral Reading Fluency] task emphasizes speed rather than comprehension and may actually penalize students who are carefully searching for meaning within the text." said that a 1-minute reading test may not be enough to measure comprehension, because they are only allowed to read for such a short amount of time, and the amount of information that is meaningful is limited. She goes on to say that because the ORF emphasizes that students read quickly and correctly, they may be more focused on reading for speed than meaning. Michael Pressley an educator at the University of Michigan states, "... if you want a test of whether kids can read fast with low comprehension, then DIBELS is great, and these [tested skills] become your end goal, DIBELS is leading teachers to infer the wrong end goal, which is to read words fast." Schilling worked with students in 1st through 3rd grades, and also stated that the scores from any other subtest except ORF at the end of 1st grade were minimal in predicting success on state testing. The teachers were encouraged to use DIBELS results in helping them make decision about reading instruction.
One research group, Amy R. Hoffman and associates, sent out a survey to classroom teachers, reading specialists, administrators, university teachers, and special education teachers. She also conducted face to face interviews asking professional if they use DIBELS and how, and what parts. The biggest response regarding the subtests was the RTF measure was the least frequently administered, and the disadvantages were an overemphasis on speed and the use of nonsense words.